Department of Psychiatry, Indiana University School of Medicine

Stark Neuroscience Research Institute

razzle dazzle provided by M. Pollock

Science can be hard. It's important to have fun.

What we do

Clinical disorders arising from maladaptive emotion regulation present a large burden on society worldwide and many of these disorders show comorbidity, for example, addiction with anxiety disorders. Even though there has been much research on reward and fear processing, the majority of studies have been conducted in parallel, investigating the neuronal circuitries separately. Our lab uses a behavioral paradigm designed to assess how safety cues can regulate fear and reward seeking behaviors in male and female rats. We hope by investigating how safety, fear and reward circuits integrate their functions to influence behavior, we will be able to better understand and treat disorders resulting from maladaptive emotion regulation.  

Sangha Lab 

Susan Sangha, PhD

Associate Professor of Psychiatry

Indiana University School of Medicine

Stark Neuroscience Research Institute

​​Newest publications from the lab:​

Ng K, Pollock M, Escobedo A, Bachman B, Miyazaki N, Bartlett EL, Sangha S (2023). Suppressing fear in the presence of a safety cue requires infralimbic cortical signaling to central amygdala. Neuropsychopharmacology, in press.

Fitzgerald J, Webb EK, Sangha S (2023). Psychological and Physiological Correlates of Stimulus Discrimination in Adults. Psychophysiology, in press.

Ng K, Sangha S (2022). Encoding of conditioned inhibitors of fear in the infralimbic cortex. Cerebral Cortex, https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhac450.

Hackleman A, Ibrahim M, Shim K, Sangha S (2022). Interaction of stress and alcohol on discriminating fear from safety and reward in male and female rats. Psychopharmacology 240: 609-621​​